For an opinion or belief, 10 percent is critical mass. If that proportion of the population emphatically embraces an idea, then it will spread rapidly to the majority of the population, scientists have found.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas,” said researcher Boleslaw Szymanski, director of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

For example, dictators who held power for decades in Tunisia and Egypt were overthrown in a matter of weeks when events pushed public opinion past the 10 percent threshold, Szymanski said.

Szymanski and colleagues tested out the spread of opinion using computer models of different social networks — one in which everyone was connected to everyone else, one with a few well-connected people and one in which everyone had the same, limited number of connections. In all cases, a few people within the network held an unwavering, but uncommon, belief; everyone else held a traditional view but was open-minded.

They found that, regardless of the type of network, 10 percent remained the threshold required to shift the majority opinion once the true believers began to speak with everyone else. [Cooperation Is Contagious*]

Using models of three different types of social networks, researchers discovered that an opinion held strongly by 10 percent of the members would rapid spread to become the majority opinion.

This finding has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads, according to the researchers.

“There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion,” said Gyorgy Korniss, a study researcher and associate professor of physics at Rensselaer. “Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”

[The above findings were published July 22, 2011 online in the journal Physical Review E.]

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Previous research has shown that majority opinion has the greatest influence on people when they consider issues that are NOT that important to them or issues they don’t want to spend much effort thinking about,” Living Science.

Considering issues that white Americans presently face and will face in the near future, an ethnocentric strategy must become important to white Americans. Social networking and activism will be a powerful component. The American Third Position is the only political party that is concerned about the voice of white Americans and a future for white Americans.

* It may be costly to individuals of a group to give up money, for example, but contribution is beneficial to the group. A group ethnocentric policy is increasingly necessary for white Americans.

Comments (9)

So…before we get all involved here, can I ask if this works in the abortion dynamic?

For example, about 10% of all voters, vote ‘Pro-life’. They are reliable one issue voters. They generally see the connection between their belief and their vote, they tend to educate themselves and will go 3rd party to vote ‘pro-life’.

At the same time, a more or less equal number of US voters, vote ‘pro-choice’;. They vote just as much, educate themselves equally and like ‘pro-life’ they frame their voting in terms of their issue.

Neither of these viewpoints, though 10%, have become the majority viewpoint of the 80% in the middle.

Neither has either viewpoint picked up secondary aspects.

For instance, ‘pro-life’ is only abortion; the viewpoint doesn’t extend to opposition to other state sanctioned killing such as prisoner executions or war.

‘Pro-choice’ is equally narrow. Most people who supports Roe v Wade but have never read it but are convinced it only makes legal abortion in the 1st or 2nd trimester and never consider the effect on teenagers being picked up at school by the Planned parenthood bus.

They support a woman’s right to choose but never extend that to include say, the right to choose to be a prostitute or the right to choose to smoke pot.

LOL. I’m as serious as Jefferson above, but think about how free of government our lives would be, if all the nice people who believe ‘a woman has a right to choose’ would actually hear what they are saying and applied it across the board!

Perhaps the’pro-choice’ people are a victim of the 10 per cent dynamic…because no one really believes in the truth of their mantra, they don't believe it either!!

There are lies — lies, and statistics as Twain said. What if 10% were awakened European American patriots, but 10% were still hardened multiculturalists? That ideas spread exponentially should be common sense, but it does us not good to think in abstractions.

Even if this ‘study’ was true (I think our the easy credulity toward it I see here and on American Renaissance is an example of the type of the superstition the racialist Right is liable to, given the degree many of its denizens have for science), it would simply underscore HOW HARD it is to get that first 10%!! the last thing we need is to see a reason for undue hope.

“There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion,” said Gyorgy Korniss, a study researcher and associate professor of physics at Rensselaer. “Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”

Indeed it is very important for those of European descent to unite. Throughout history, Whites have constantly been defending themselves from other groups, and today is no different. Ten percent of the White population in the US is do able.
I tip my hat to people like Steve Smith and Harry Bartram. We need more to follow in their foot steps. They are risking everything they have for the love of their people…and that, my friends, is what seperates us. Altruism, honor, courage, etc, are our foundation. Our blood is our wealth, and never forget that.

If out of ten people one person happens to have developed a strong opinion or belief, then the whole group is doomed to accept it pretty soon. Now, if every one of the ten persons develops one idea and strongly believes it, all these people are sooner or later liable to be believing all ten ideas equally strongly. Is it not what modernist post-industrial popular culture is all about? Eclecticism boiling down to a tepid grey mass of uniform faceless consumerism.